From a window of the grey, six-story U.S. embassy in Saigon, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and U.S. Military Advisory Chief William Westmoreland gazed down on the violent scene. Massed in the street before the embassy was a cursing, fist-shaking throng led by some 300 yellow-robed Buddhist monks and nuns, screaming demands that the U.S. abandon Premier Tran Van Huong —and thinly veiled invitations that it get out of South Viet Nam.
Vietnamese paratroopers guarding the shuttered and barred embassy entrance permitted a small group of demonstrators to hand over an anti-Huong petition to Taylor. But then the mob, urged on by the...